Starting in the 1960s with the rise of the New Left, it became sport for cool people and liberals to mock movies such as I Was a Communist for the FBI or My Son John. The excesses of Sen. Joe McCarthy had made red hunting suspect, even shameful. Yet McCarthy was more often right than wrong. There were communists in the government, and in Hollywood, who wanted to destroy America.

In 2024, however, with the far Left not only alive after the collapse of the Soviet Union but thriving in Washington, these films from the 1950s seem prescient — and deadly serious rather than goofy. In I Was a Communist for the FBI, for example, an FBI agent infiltrated the Communist Party in Pittsburgh and learned that their plan was “a hellbrew of hate” — urban riots intended to “divide and conquer” by pitting the races against each other and causing so much mayhem that the Left could establish order and make huge profits off the court cases. Another character in the film is a high school teacher who asks, “What better place to serve the party than in a high school?” It’s still true today.